Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to expanding the universal provision of free school lunches to include all primary school children, during school term-time, by August 2022.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-01507 on
‎ 30 July 2021. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at Written questions and answers | Scottish Parliament Website

Assaults on police officers including by spitting or coughing are despicable and this is especially during times with prevalence of Covid-19 in communities.

Deliberately spitting and coughing on police officers is a form of assault and the maximum sentence for an assault is life imprisonment. This is the most severe form of penalty available under the criminal law and is available under the common law of assault.

In addition, there are specific offences in the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 which also provide protection for police officers.

The combination of these laws provide full protection under the law with the independent court deciding what an appropriate sentence is in a given case. The Scottish Government fully supports independent courts having extensive powers to deal robustly with perpetrators.

We continue to ask all organisations to support staff who experience violence in the workplace including Police Scotland themselves with encouragement of the reporting of such incidents for appropriate action to be taken.

Table 1 shows the average daily number of Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) Contact Tracers scheduled to work on the COVID-19 Test and Protect service each week from 1 May. These are projected workforce figures taken from management information submitted by Health Boards in weekly returns and therefore do not necessarily represent final deployment figures. Wider support and administration staff are not included in these returns.

The Scottish Government does not hold data centrally on the proportion of these staff who are secondees or redeployed; the secondment and deployment of staff is a matter for each board.

Table 1. Whole Time Equivalent Contact Tracers working for the COVID-19 Test and Protect service in each week from 1 May 2021

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-01507 on
‎ 30 July 2021. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at Written questions and answers | Scottish Parliament Website

The Scottish Breast Screening Programme invites women between the ages of 50 and 70 for routine breast screening every three years. This is in line with advice from the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC), which is an independent scientific body that advises all four nations of the UK on screening matters. The Scottish government will only act to widen screening age ranges if this is recommended by the UK NSC.

I will shortly be writing to the UK NSC to ask them to examine the merits of lowering the current age thresholds for screening programmes. I recognise in doing so that any change to age ranges for screening must be based on the highest standards of evidence, and balance both potential harms and benefits.

The breast screening programme is governed by the Breast Screening Programme Board as well as the National Screening Oversight and the Scottish Screening Committee. They monitor and evaluate performance, including uptake rates, against a set of standards developed by Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

Since the breast screening programme restarted last summer, additional steps have been taken to ensure uptake of appointments despite the impact from the Covid-19 pandemic. These include:

• breast screening centres contacting participants ahead of their appointments to confirm their intention to attend;
• providing information to reassure people that infection control measures are in place and, during lockdown, that attending a screening appointment was considered essential travel; and
• clearly communicating the importance of screening, along with tailored messaging to recognise additional concerns and challenges caused by the pandemic, for example for people who were shielding.

The Scottish Government recognises that the Covid-19 pandemic may have exacerbated inequalities in screening uptake across all national screening programmes, and we have committed £2 million over the next two years, to build a programme of evidence-based, sustainable and scalable projects that tackle inequalities in a systemic way.

The current national waiting times statistics for CAMHS and Psychological Therapies do not provide a breakdown of who is waiting for specific types of treatment. Therefore, we are unable to report on specific waits for suicide prevention treatments.

A patient level data set (CAMHS and PT National Dataset) is currently under development by PHS which will provide more detail on the diagnosis and treatments received by individuals, and associated waiting times.

It is the responsibility of individual health boards to provide high quality care that is safe, effective and person-centred. If a child or young person presents as being at real and immediate risk of harm to themselves, to others, health Boards should see these people as urgent cases and prioritise seeing them regardless of where they are on a waiting list.

No-one should be the victim of abuse or violence while at work. Assaults on emergency service workers and police officers are despicable and the Scottish Government fully supports courts having their current extensive powers to deal robustly with perpetrators.

The maximum sentence for an assault on emergency workers including the police is life imprisonment. This is the most severe form of penalty available under the criminal law and is available under the common law of assault.

In addition, there are specific offences in the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 which also provide protection for emergency service workers and police officers.

The combination of these laws provide full protection under the law with the independent court deciding what an appropriate sentence is in a given case.

We continue to encourage all organisations to support staff who experience violence in the workplace including reporting such incidents for appropriate action to be taken by Police Scotland.

The criminal law is always kept under review to assess whether changes can be made to improve how it operates. In the context of maximum penalties for assaults on emergency workers being life imprisonment, the Scottish Government has no current plans to change the laws in this area given the extensive powers courts have.

On 22 June 2018 the Scottish Government and COSLA wrote to public sector leaders, including all chairs and Chief Executives of public bodies, inviting them to submit proposals to the Local Governance Review. 20 Local Authorities, 6 Community Planning Partnerships and 16 other public bodies responded. Appendix One of the summary report published in May 2019 sets out the full list of respondents.

On 28 November 2019, the Scottish Government and COSLA provided an update to all public sector leaders . This highlighted opportunities for functional, fiscal and community empowerment and invited place-specific proposals for alternative governance arrangements. Councils have been working with local partners to develop proposals and dialogue with Scottish Government officials has commenced to explore the proposed changes and how they could improve outcomes.